Storage and Virtualization (and whatever else I feel like)

Monthly Archives: November 2016

It all begins in the configuration builder tool

This article focuses on the implementation and management of encryption with NetApp storage. Data at Rest Encryption (NetApp Volume Encryption or NVE for short) is one of the ways that you can achieve encryption with NetApp, and it’s one of the most exciting new features of ONTAP 9.1. Here’s how you go about implementing it.

If you’re a partner or NetApp SE, when building configurations, as long as the cluster software version is set to 9.x, there is a checkbox that lets you decide which version of ONTAP gets written to the device at the factory. As of 9.1, ONTAP software images will either be capable of encryption via a software encryption module, or not. There are laws around both the import and export of software that is capable of encryption, but that is beyond the scope of this article. I do know you can use the encryption-capable image in Canada (where I am located), so I’m covered. If you’re unsure about the laws in your country, consult your legal adviser on this matter.

Once this cluster-level toggle has been set and you add hardware into the configuration, there are two more checkboxes in the software section:

The first one triggers the generation of the license key for NVE and the second one activates a piece of hardware dedicated to deal with cryptographic keys. One thing I’m still not sure of is (should you choose to remove the checkmark) if the TPM is simply disabled or doesn’t physically exist in your NetApp controller, I have an email into NetApp to confirm this. [Update: The module is integral to the controller and disabled in firmware if being shipped to certain countries. Shout out to @Keith_Aasen for tracking that down for me.]

Okay, now for the more customer-relevant information…

To get started with NVE, you’re going to need a few things:

A encryption-capable platform

A encryption-capable image of ONTAP

A key manager

A license key for NVE

Encryption-capable platform

The following platforms are currently capable of encryption: FAS6290, FAS80xx, FAS8200, and AFF A300. This is limited by the CPU in the platform as it must have a sufficient clock-speed and core-count with support for the AES instruction set. I’m sure this list will be ever-expanding, but be sure to check first if you’re hoping to use NVE. [UPDATE: After some digging, I can confirm that all the new models support NVE, the entry-level FAS2650 included.]

Encryption-capable image of ONTAP

Provided you’re not in a restricted country as per the above, your image will be the standard nomenclature of X_q_image.tgz where X is the version number. The non-encryption-capable version will be X_q_nodar_image.tgz which I’ll simply refer to as nodar(e) (No Data At Rest Encryption) for the rest of this article. The output of version -v will tell you if you’re nodar or standard.

Key manager

The on-board key manager introduced in ONTAP 9.0 enables you to manage keys for use with your NSE drives, helping you avoid costly and possibly complex external solutions. Currently, NVE only supports using the on-board manager, so if you’re going to use NVE layered on top of NSE, you need to use the on-board one.

Setting this up is exactly one command:

security key-manager setup

You’ll be prompted for a passphrase, and that’s it, you’re done.

License key for NVE

If you didn’t get this license key at time of purchase, talk to your account representative or SE over at NetApp (though, hopefully, if you’ve bought one of the new systems announced at Insight 2016, they decided to include it since, at least for now, it is a no-cost license).

What next?

Now that you’ve got all the prerequisites covered, encrypting your data is very simple. As the name implies, encryption is done at the volume level, so naturally it’s a volume command that encrypts the data (a volume move command, in fact):

Wrapping up

NetApp Volume Encryption is pretty easy, but since it’s so new, OnCommand System Manager doesn’t support it just yet. You’ll have to stick to the CLI for now, although I’m sure the GUI will catch up eventually, if that’s your preferred point of administration. It should also be noted that while NSE solutions are FIPS 140-2 compliant, NVE has yet to go through the qualifications. Also, if FIPS is a requirement, the on-board key manager isn’t compliant yet either. Since with the on-board key manager the keys are literally stored on the same hardware using them, NVE only protects you from compromised data on individual drives removed from your environment through theft or RMA. If someone gained wholesale access to the HA pairs, the data would still be retrievable. Also, this is for data-at-rest only. You must follow other precautions for data-in-flight encryption.

Into the weeds

I did all my tests for this post using the simulator, and I learned a lot, but your mileage may vary. In the end, only you are responsible for what you do to your data. I had heard that if you have the wrong software image then you’d have to do a complete wipe of your HA pair in order to convert it. I have since proven this wrong (at least in the simulator) and I definitely can’t guarantee the following will be supported.

For my tests I had two boot images loaded: one standard and one nodar. What I learned is that you can boot into either mode, provided you don’t have any encrypted data. Even if you have the key manager setup and NVE is licensed, you can still boot back and forth. The first time you boot your system using the nodar image with encrypted data on the system, however, you’ll hose the whole thing. I did test first encrypting data, then decrypting it, then converting to nodar, and the simulator booted fine. When I booted into nodar with an encrypted volume, even going back to standard didn’t work. Booting into maintenance mode shows the aggregates with a status of partial and the boot process hints that they are in some sort of transition phase (7MTT?). Either way, I was unable to recover my simulator once I got it to this state, so I definitely advise against it in production. Heck, I’d advise you just to use the proper image to start with.

I hope you learned something. If you have any questions or comments, either post them below or reach out on twitter. I’m @ChrisMaki from the #NetAppATeam and Solution Architect @ScalarDecisions.

Since Insight Berlin is now done and several of my fellow A-Team’ers have already done their own “Insight wrap-up” blogs, and you can check them out for a detailed run down of all the awesome stuff that NetApp is coming out with in the next year, I figured I should get mine done as well (posts from @mcbride_ruairi and @NFSDudeAbides to start you off). While all that stuff is really cool (ONTAP 9, new All Flash FAS, etc.), what was the most inspiring for me from this year’s conference is how NetApp is bringing the “vision” of the Data Fabric to life with a couple of key advancements.

Flash (and ONTAP) Everywhere

Since 2014, when George Kurian announced the Data Fabric on stage at Insight, NetApp has really pushed its flash portfolio in new directions. The subsequent acquisition of SolidFire has bolstered NetApp’s position in the market, while giving customers more options and improved capabilities for deploying flash in their data centers. This year, George set the goal (albeit a bit lofty) of being the number one flash vendor in the world, and with that attitude and the right strategy, they seem like they’re on their way.

Of course, the big to-do around flash this year at Insight was the refresh of the All Flash FAS line of storage systems. It was the biggest hardware refresh in NetApp’s history, with the introduction of the new FAS2600 and FAS8200 lines as well as the new AFF A300 and AFF A700 systems. Along with this comes 32Gb Fibre Channel and 40Gb Ethernet, which is a first for the SAN world and helps position the storage better for flash.

But instead of these announcements just being the shiny new toys for engineers to ooh and ah over, NetApp brought them to market with the strategic intent to help customers access their data anywhere. The importance of data was a central element throughout the conference, with the “data is the currency of the digital economy” message resonating loud and clear. One of my favorite quotes from the event was, “[In the past,] data was just there to run your business. Now data is your business.”

With the increased capabilities and applicability of flash comes the more pronounced ubiquity of ONTAP in the Data Fabric. NetApp’s strategy has always been to help customers move and utilize data where it can deliver the most value to them, and this year they are making some big strides in that direction. Tools like Flash Cache, Flash Pool, SnapMirror, SnapVault, and others are being expanded across the portfolio to deliver a seamless data management experience.

Another cool piece of software that they’re bringing out is called Cloud Control, which enables you to back up your data that resides with SaaS providers within SnapCenter, things like Office 365, with support for other SaaS providers to come. They showcased a pretty fancy-looking SnapCenter with cataloguing and all sorts of other cool features to help you manage cloud data like you would your on-premises storage. SnapCenter is currently free, but with how cool Cloud Control is gonna be, I honestly have no idea why they wouldn’t want to monetize it.

Renewed Focus on Developers, a Sign of Greatness to Come

This idea of an open, flexible, and secure ecosystem for your data is only going to get more crystalized as time goes on. Something that my fellow A-Teamer Jesse Anderson blogged about a while back that struck me as well was NetApp’s focus on the developer at Insight. I think it’s a sign of a cultural shift that will only further enable the Data Fabric. The introduction of thePub, this place where developers can coalesce and share ideas to make the Data Fabric better, is a huge step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

I’m really excited to see what that future has in store for NetApp and the Data Fabric. See you next year!

Ever since clustered Data ONTAP went mainstream over 7-Mode, the dedicated root aggregate tax has been a bone of contention for many, especially for those entry-level systems with internal drives. Can you imagine buying a brand new FAS2220 or FAS2520 and being told that not only are you going to lose two drives as spares, but also another six to your root aggregates? This eﬀectively left you with four drives for your data aggregate, two of which would be devoted to parity. I don’t think so. Now, this is a bit of an extreme example that was seldom deployed. Hopefully you had a deployment engineer who cared about the end result and would use RAID-4 for the root aggregates and maybe not even assign a spare to one controller, giving you seven whole disks for your active-passive deployment. Still, this was kind of a shaft. In a 24-disk system deployed active-active, you’d likely get something like this:

Enter ADP.

In the ﬁrst version of ADP introduced in version 8.3, clustered Data ONTAP gained the ability to partition drives on systems with internal drives as well as the ﬁrst two shelves of drives on All Flash FAS systems. What this meant was the dedicated root aggregate tax got a little less painful. In this ﬁrst version of ADP, clustered Data ONTAP carved each disk into two partitions: a small one for the root aggregates and a larger one for the data aggregate(s). This was referred to as root-data or R-D partitioning. The smaller partition’s size depended on how many drives existed. You could technically buy a system with fewer than 12 drives, but the ADP R-D minimum was eight drives. By default, both partitions on a disk were owned by the same controller, splitting overall disk ownership in half.

You could change this with some advanced command-line trickery to still build active-passive systems and gain two more drive partitions’ worth of data. Since you were likely only building one large aggregate on your system, you could also accomplish this in System Setup if you told it to create one large pool. This satisﬁed the masses for a while, but then those crafty engineers over at NetApp came up with something better.

Enter ADPv2.

Starting with ONTAP 9, not only did ONTAP get a name change (7-Mode hasn’t been an option since version 8.2.3), but it also gained ADPv2 which carves the aforementioned data partition in half, or R-D2 (Root-Data,Data) sharing for SSDs. Take note of the aforementioned SSDs there, as spinning disks aren’t eligible for this secondary partitioning. In this new version, you get one drive back that you would have allocated to be a spare, and you also get two of the parity drives back, lessening the pain of the RAID tax. With a minimum requirement of eight drives and a maximum of 48, here are the three main scenarios for this type of partitioning.

12 Drives:

24 Drives:

48 Drives:

As you can see, this is a far more eﬃcient way of allocating your storage that yields up to ~17% more usable space on your precious SSDs.

So that’s ADP and ADPv2 in a nutshell—a change for the better. Interestingly enough, the ability to partition disks has lead to a radical change in the FlashPool world called “Storage Pools,” but that’s a topic for another day.